Field of the Invention
The present generally relates to displays and, more particularly, to a display apparatus equipped with a touch panel, and a display method.
Description of the Related Art
In touch panel-equipped devices typified by a smartphone and a tablet terminal, various operations can be performed with a finger or a stylus pen. One of such operations is an operation for range-selecting a part of a character string displayed on a device display unit and copying or pasting the selected character string. In some devices, such an operation can be performed by a touching on a display unit with a plurality of fingers simultaneously.
When a character string displayed on the device display unit is range-selected, however, a situation, in which part of the display unit is hidden from the sight of an operator by the finger(s) in the process of a touch operation, arises. This has caused a problem that the visual observation of the state of the range selection becomes difficult and the selection range may deviate in some cases. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-048497 discusses performing a syntactic analysis on a character string to be selected to separate the character string into phrases. If a user passes the finger over a boundary between phrases when selecting the character string, a vibration function included in the device produces vibrations. According to such a method, the user can be notified of a rough indication of to what character the character string has been selected, by vibrations produced when the finger is passed over the boundaries of phrases.
However, according to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-048497, there is a limit that the character string to be selected needs to be traced with a finger. Such a method may be not applicable to determining a selection range by specifying a start point and an end point. In addition, the selected range may be deviated when the finger is released from the display unit in a touch operation.